#pride

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#courage #courage-to-be-oneself #independent-thought #lightning #lightning-rod

In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#narcisissism #pride #vanity #age

You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett) ↗

— Jane Austen

#behaviour #declaration #empowerment #gentlemanlike #gentlemen

The first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead. ↗

— Jack Weatherford

#control #ghengis-khan #historical-person #leadership #mongols

My father referred to it as "the finest song ever written for fifteen fingers." He made me play it when I was getting too full of myself and felt I needed humbling. Suffice to say I practice it with fair regularity, sometimes more than once a day. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#arrogance-and-attitude #humbling #pride #attitude

All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride. ↗

— Sophocles

#character #course #crime #failure #mistakes

I'm never proud of my old work. I always feel as though my skills have since improved. ↗

— Criss Jami

#art #better #betterment #change #creativity

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#truth #courage

Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm. ↗

— Jonathan Shay

#pride #reality #war #courage

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#courage #pride #courage